I M Perfect lady

Tag: children

  • Hear Their Cries.

    It is that time a year when on my route, I get to see babies in nature.  The ones I particularly love, are the fawns.  They are so wobbly and tiny, and yet expected to cross the roads quickly behind their moms.  I have seen three sets this spring.

    IMG_8063
    This little one got confused.  It did not follow the mom, and was making crying noises.  When I got between the baby and his mom, she came back across the road and stood between me and baby.  And she began making distress noises.  I drove off, letting them be in peace.  And, forgetting to get her picture.  You can tell by the size of the "For Sale" sign, how tiny it is.

    Further on the route, on a paved road, I again watched a mom cross the road, and a baby start, hesitate and then go back to the side of the road and lay down.

    So, I slowly drove up and snapped this picture.

    IMG_8064
    This is right on the side of the pavement….I am just leaning out of my passenger window.  It can almost hide in the short grass.

    IMG_8066
    As I am taking this picture, the mom comes back across the road, but quickly disappears in the trees. I again, leave…knowing I am causing them both stress.

    What amazes me is how attentive the mothers are in nature, and how defensive of their little ones, how they will put themselves in the way of danger to save their child. The natural mother instinct to protect, is alive and well out in the wild.

    What a marvel that without parenting classes they do this so well.  I said to the momma deer that stood and pranced in distress…."Good Mom, you are doing a good job!"

    And then there is the human species, who seem to fail at this in rising numbers.

    I am not sure if our natural mother instincts are disengaged, or do we not recognize danger?  

    In my experience, my body had a warning system fully engaged, but my mind overrode this "fear" signal.  It first of all deleted the molestation pictures or failed to even record them. So, all I had was a beeping body, but nothing else to go on.  My fears of my father seemed groundless and false.

    I was unable to discern danger…for I wanted my mind to agree. 

    As a child, in order to survive, our minds protect us. By not remembering the abuse. And this alone disengages the danger knowing.  We can't survive in childhood, with all of our faculties, IF we know, we are in danger.  Yet, oddly, what we don't feel is safe. We are not if full blown danger, but nor are we relaxed and feeling cared for.

    I have been thinking about what I could contribute to Dial Help as a hand out.  For they handed to me what was abuse.  I am thinking, instead there needs to be a worksheet, that is similar to "You know you're a Redneck, IF…."

    So, it would be, "You know you're a victim, IF…"

    The way the human body and mind work together to help us survive, is the hurdle we need to overcome in order to get back to who we were prior to abuse.

    This mechanism that is automatic, pre-sets us into believing what is not real…and not believing that which IS.

    Our inner sight and knowing is completely backwards.

    It is my belief, that there are many folks just like me in the FALC, who have this psychic blindness. And we are asking the blind to see. How?

     I am not sure I can articulate this accurately, to portray the dilemma any agency will have to flip this around, for they are living in a sea of danger and are unaware.

    The momma deer, knows I am a danger to her child.

    The woman who is married to a pedophile doesn't see the danger.

    What I do believe, though, at least in my experience…is that the child is trying to teach the parent. The child is giving out signals that the parent is missing.

    But what I also know to be true in most cases, is that the parent themselves are abused and their own pain has them so self absorbed, they can't see their children.

    They haven't healed from their own childhoods…so they don't know how to mother naturally, and to know danger.  Unlike animals in nature, we don't know who the predators are.

    And when this is so, the children are left unprotected.  It is open season all year round, and a child has no one to hear their cries.




  • Being on a Leash.

    As I listened to the rest of the book, ""Sway" The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior…by Ori Brafman, I learned more about the nature of being human and the irrational reasons we do that which we do.

    What I love is that all humans respond similarly; that no one is immune, that our bodies and brains are all equal…and we all fall victim to the irresistible pull of irrational behavior…it is in our nature.

    Our brains work the same way when prompted and can be fooled and are tricked more often than not.

    The example of a world renowned Violin Player playing his violin in the Subway…on his 3 million dollar violin, will go unnoticed, for he is out of place.  Our minds will not consider the inconsiderable, unless we challenge it or perhaps force it to go against the irresistible pull to go against what it 'knows'.  And it knows that famous Violin Players are in concert halls not in subways.

    In this case the violin player is out of its normal environment…so we fail to see him.

    I was also enthralled with the dynamics of groups and how we fail to act as an individual within them…unless one Individual stands up…we will move as a group, swayed in the same direction.

    I know this works in a cult.  And any dissenters are quickly shunned into silence…for in order for a cult to work, there can be only one leader and one view point…a cult is not a free society…you are ALL to move as ONE.

    When raised in a cult, you use the same model for your family; the parents are the leaders and there can be no dissenters present…ever.  Those who dare speak against the parent are quickly removed from having any relationship with those inside.

    For you are a threat to the force of One.  ONE family…not one individual within the family….the family comes first before your individual needs.  You are not allowed to do for Self.

    A dissenter isn't allowed to come in whether as a voice of a child within the family or an outsider.

    A dissenter brings gifts of discord and discord brings disagreement and disagreement opens the door that weakens the group and will lead to the empowerment of the individual.

    And dysfunctional families and cults are NOT interested in the power of the individual…keeping the Group together is the pull which leads to incredible irrational behavior. 

    The very thing that an abused child needs is kept from them…empowerment, being an individual, owner of her feelings…etc.

    An empowered child will not allow further abuse.  

    An empowered individual will not stay within a cult.

    Only victims are not empowered.

    This fear based irrational behavior of parents clinging tightly to the family group, lead to children having to push back in order to heal…or remain powerless inside.

    What my mother said she wanted was for me to heal, but she wanted me to do that within the structure of an abusive family.  It is like being a free spirit within a cult.

    The dynamics of a dysfunctional family is that there is but one leader, one voice and one choice and there is no room for a second opinion or feeling or expression or an equal power.  The very structure is based on Victim and Abuser.  

    This structure will not stand if there is empowerment or a dissenting vote.

    What most dysfunctional families want is to remain the same while allowing the adult children to heal.

    Each time I have written HEAL, what flashes through my mind is a dog heeling….keeping him on a loose leash…walking beside you.

    This is what freedom looks like to a dysfunctional family…they still want you to remain on a family leash, obediently walking while the parent holds the leash.

     

    IMG_6985

    Life just isn't the same being on a leash…

     

  • Who Knew and Turned Away.

    The evidence report adds credence to my journey, it gives supporting evidence, names, locations, and sets the tone or energy of what I felt towards my father.   It takes this inner feeling that I had and makes it public knowledge.

    This public knowledge sits so heavily upon me, for years I watched and waited for a reaction that would tell me that others seen my father as Not Normal, yet he was always treated normally, so my feelings that he wasn’t right went unsubstantiated. 

    I had to look up Unsubstantiated.

    1.             Unsubstantiated means, unverified: not proven factually.

    Synonyms: unconfirmed, unproven, unsupported, uncorroborated

    The greatest tragedy is that I waited for an adult or any person to verify that what I felt about my father was true.  That my terror feelings were spot on, and yet no one led on to what they knew or suspected.

    I was left alone unsupported with this knowledge and my body refused to let go of.

    I am thinking what is a deeper wound than the abuse itself is to then have your feelings of the event go unconfirmed.

    No one wanted to corroborate what I had experienced and what fills my body with incredulousness is that I now have facts, verifiable facts, and supported data showing that they knew, but kept this information from me. 

    When I need an adult the most, they failed to support me.

    Here is what I read yesterday…

    “Jenich spoke with Marvin Heinonen, retired Houghton County Protective Services Manager.  Marvin informed myself that indeed Ray Huhta has been under suspicion for at least THIRTY years for sexual assaulting his own children and most of the young girls in the Saint Mary’s Location neighborhood north of Hancock.”

    (a paragraph has info on a victim, so I am excluding it)

    “Marvin Heinonen said back then and even into the later years when Ray Huhta was suspected of molesting girls, there seemed to be a cover up all the time, meaning people in the church and family members would not believe that Ray Huhta could be doing this.  Marvin said the information kept resurfacing for years that Ray Huhta is a pedophile, molesting his girls…”

    One victim wrote in her statement about her family contacting Peter Torola of the Apostolic Luthern Church that she was molested by Ray Huhta. She recalls Torola’s response to her, “What is your motive in telling on Ray Huhta?”  She also stated that three more victims approached minister Pete Torola after she left the area and nothing was done.

    Another victim said her parents confronted Ray and he denied the whole time, from that point on her family’s children were forbidden to go to the Huhta house.

    What was more horrifying to learn so many years ago, was not only did I have to find peace with having a pedophile for a father, but I also learned that so many knew and did nothing.  That 30 years ago he was suspected and the girls told to stay away…

    And some knew 40 years back and at the time wanted to know the ‘motive’ for telling on Ray. Telling on Ray.  Really?

    Imagine that?  Like we are gossips?… And how telling is it that Pete Torola didn’t disbelieve it, he just wondered about the motive for telling.

    Perhaps he had a motive to keep it silent…for a child’s only motive is for you all to see what we see, for you to change your ‘normal’ definition to not normal.

    I guess I wasn’t prepared to hear the details of the little girls, and had braced myself,  but I hadn’t expected the stories held bits and pieces of how uninterested the adults were about the children in the Huhta house.

    I am not meaning to lessen the girls in my neighborhood who were abused by my father, but what stands out is that their parents warned them away from our home, but no one came and took us out.

    I have six sisters…plus eight brothers, and we lived with the Pedophile and his wife. That was our only home.

    We were left there knowingly.

    Somehow, I would feel slightly better if no one knew…if we had gone underneath the radar, an incest nest undetected, but instead it was operating in full plain view and many just turned their heads away from the Huhta children living within.

    What does a person do with this information?

    How do your process the minister’s neglect or Protective Services suspecting but without follow through or neighbors keeping their children away with no heed to us living full time with a ‘suspected’ pedophile. 

    Surely these are actions of an enemy and not of a friend.

    I am not bitter or angry, but I am wise and now validated, vindicated…but it is a hollow victory.

    You find out no one was standing for you…you never mattered enough.

    The main reason I am working with Tom Rosemurgy, is I refuse to be one of the adults who knew and turned away…

     

  • Voted off.

    I am perplexed about the unnatural reaction to being told of a pedophile in your midst…and the lack of natural responses or reflexes.

    I just wonder if the same message was given, but I said it was in the local school, what then would be the response?

    Would they immediately defend the school?  Or would they ask and want to know who this individual was?

    It is hard for me to wrap my mind around the fact, that not one person was curious as to which congregation housed the sexual predators and where did he/she live?  Not one. Silence.  Well, not really silence, but defense of an institution.

    Is this because they already know where they are?

    Or do they not want to know the truth?

    I can’t figure this one out.

    It feels like those of us who are alerting congregants of this behavior are pegged as the ones tearing down the stairway to heaven.  That if you believe us, you will not make the climb heavenward.

    So you stick to the end game, keep your eyes on the goal of heaven and disregard messages that could pop holes in your faith.

    It seems you have great faith in a vehicle that will get you to heaven, while I am telling you there is not enough gas, the tires are bald and there is a klunk in the engine…and it isn’t looking well for you…it is starting to look like a gamble and not the sure shot you were told to believe in.

    I did not wreck the car, but noticed the damage. I did not design this car or make you the promise that it had magic powers to erase all sins.  This is not something I neither created nor is it mine to fix.  I am just reporting

    But I am telling you how it stalled and died on me.

    How the magic button didn’t erase the pedophilia from my father…he kept going and going and going.

    How the eraser didn’t erase his sickness at all.

    I am telling you that there are other sick people that your forgiveness of sins will not correct or halt or stop in anyway.

    They sit and sing with you…and you never even asked who.

    The infection is spreading while you use words to eradicate behavior that years and years of therapy and the desire to do so can only stop.

    Truly, do you really believe that a few words spoken to a man who has a sexual disease, that those words, will cure him?

    It is in the cells and in the DNA, it will take efforts of Herculean strength to face and deal and heal. 

    What I can sense and I am sure he/she can sense is that this religion is not even interested or caring who is within the confines of its membership.

    If the lack of questions is any indicator, there is nothing there that shows him/her there are boundaries and standards within the mission statement.

    All are welcome here. 

    Well, not all…those who speak the truth are voted off.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • The Raw and Perfect Truth.

    As I thought about the way we paint people, how we are taught at a very young age to temper our truths, what we see and how we feel, how we not only learn to paint ourselves in false colors, but others as well. 

    We tell little children it is ‘not nice’ to call a fat person fat.

    It is not nice to say that someone who is mean is mean.

    That it is not nice to say grandma made you feel bad.

    We are teaching them, It is not nice to speak your truth…

    And, speaking your truth will make others feel bad.

    Is that right?  How can that be?  How in the world are the child’s words and feelings put aside to protect the mean or fat person?

    And then we wonder why they don’t come and tell us when a mean Uncle so and so did bad things to them.  They have been taught that their feelings don’t matter and that the truth is not kind.

    I am quite certain the fat person knows she/he is fat.

    And perhaps it may be better for us to engage in a conversation about it. 

    When I began speaking my truth, it felt like I was doing something bad.

    Like I had broken the ‘golden’ rule of kindness, that I had turned a corner into the forbidden territory, and all hell would break lose.

    And it did, the pretty painted picture shattered and crumbled.

    I lost friends and family when I spoke out loud and became like a very very stubborn child. I refused to give up what I had seen, how I felt and how the other person’s actions affected me.

    For once in my life, I looked at me in truth and how the world around me felt to me, looked to me…and my coloring people crayons disappeared.

    And the paints I used to tone down what I saw and how I felt…completely dried up. 

    I then discovered an incredible freedom and how easy it was to not have to come up with an excuse for others or worry how my truth would make them feel.

    Byron Katie’s book, “Loving What is” showed me how it was okay and actually a very sacred place to be.

    I was walking with God in reality. 

    I saw what God saw.

    He didn’t paint a sunset over to make it into a bird, nor a tree into a river.  He kept them all in their natural states.  I could then see the perfection in everything. 

    A mean person is mean.

    An unhappy person is unhappy.

    A homeless man has no home.

    A biting dog bites.

    A pedophile abuses children.

    A drunken person drinks.

    A neglectful mother neglects her children. 

    I didn’t try to make any of the above different, it was impossible and not my job.  I retired as the painter to make their lives appear kinder and feel better to me.

    Instead I felt them as they were…I opened myself up to feel all the things I had previously painted, I stripped them down so only their truths shone forth.

    I felt what it feels like to have a pedophile father, a neglectful mother.  I felt it all wash over me removing my own paints of being normal and okay.

    Stripped bare I stood with a family minus the pretty paint.

    Its unvarnished rawness of glaring truths…

    It wasn’t pretty but it was my truth…and I didn’t have the strength or the desire to pick up a brush and cover it up.

    I let it lay there in all its ugly perfect glory… the raw and perfect truth. 

     

     

  • What I can verify.

     

    My brother wrote a post on his blog, www.messyguru.typepad.com called, Rumor Has It.

     

    I looked up the definition of Rumor and it said, “Unverified report.” 

    I wonder how much of each of our lives gets by us unverified?

    What we mostly don’t verify is where we came from, is this normal, and is it true.

    We rarely verify our beliefs or our definitions of love or abuse, or the validity of the rules of our religion.

    We don’t verify them, but we don’t call them rumors. 

    We don’t verify them, but we believe them to be our truths.

    We don’t say, “it is a rumor that wearing red nail polish will keep me from heaven.”  Without verifying this report, we believe it and call it truth.

    Or, “It is a rumor that if I take control of my body and decide how many kids I have, I will go to hell.”  How can you possibly verify that?  Yet it is believed as true.

    And we don’t say, “It is a rumor that no sin is too great to forgive or that all sin is of equal value.”  Has this been verified?  Can a cuss word and a man raping a child be the same worth? Is that what we believe to be true?

    Doesn’t it make you wonder what we call rumors and what we call truth.

    What is verified and what is Unverified.

    Somehow the FALC has this all upside down and backwards.

    If what they believe in is unverified, than is it possible that what they don’t believe in is verifiable.

    Is it possible that when they hear a ‘rumor’ about so and so being a pedophile, or being creepy, they are actually spreading the truth and believing it?

    Do they even know what is truth and what is fiction? 

    This is how I found myself when who I had called dad was actually a pedophile. The people that I loved actually abused me and didn’t love me. I was completely upside down and backwards in most of my definitions and what I believed in.

    The churches ideology actually fit perfect into my backwards home life, it matched perfectly.

    My rumors were my truths and my truths were rumors.

    It is horrifying and shocking what folks in the FALC are believing in and what they are spreading as rumors.  I am here to tell you it is completely backwards.

    The rumors floating around in victim circles are facts and verifiable by the results of their lives. By the trails and trials of their journeys. 

    The suicides and attempts, depression and addictions, the mental disorders, and casual sex, the married girls using their bodies like puppy mills, generations of pedophiles, etc…are all signposts and can be verified by their lives.  These are not rumors.

    And these are not accidents or freaks of nature; they are actually perfect results of living in a home of abuse and believing in the way of the FALC.  It is a one two punch and the results are again, verifiable by the lives they live in reality.

    The victims lives are not rumors…and what you call ‘rumors’ about their perpetrators are verifiable…so they cannot be called rumor, for rumor is an unverified report.

    The wounded children are the verification as they live their lives upside down and backwards, out of control and believing they are certifiably nuts, crazy and insane.

    What they fail to appreciate is that they are perfect and the world they came from is insane.  And it is only when they continue to try and make the insane sane is when they go nuts.

    Where they come from is so insane, that they believe and die for rumors and disregard the truth as it walks talks and breathes in front of them.

    It is my humble opinion from my experience of coming out of the FALC and being raised in a family where the head of the house was a pedophile, where the mother supported him and her religion without question or verification to the contrary, that both are steeped in rumors and where truth is kicked to the curb.

    I should know, I am sitting on the curb for demanding and investigating and Verifying rumors…rumors within my family of origin and the religion I was born into.

    For forty-six years I lived an unverified life.  I believed what I was told to believe and disregarded the rest…now, I sit with rumors and look around reality to see what I can verify. 

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Disguised as a religious church.

    What came to me is that religion wants to be separated from the people in the church, each and every time a scandal darkens it by one of the congregants. It is then there is a separation between religion and the people who worship it.

    What is it? Does it stand separated from the people; can you add it on and take it off at will? Is it within the walls of a church, where is this religion that stands alone?

    If the people are not all representatives of the religion, then where is it?

    When I discussed the pedophiles within the church, they make it seem like those folks are not representatives of the religion, that they somehow are now separated.

    I just can’t see where you can take the religion out of the man…

    Where is religion stored in a person, where is its compartment of being?

    From my experience the religion was the man/woman. How you moved and where you went all pointed to which religion you were.

    There is no separation between who you are and what religion you worshiped it was all one.

    My mother made no moves without her religion.

    I made moves that went against my religion and was made to feel less than, but they made sense to me, so I moved.
    I was a rebel in my religion when I made decisions that went against the rules. The goal of the religion was to keep us all uniform.

    What I think they failed to take into consideration is the human factor, for their religion looks good on paper but its application fails in reality.

    While trying to preserve the religion they disregard the children, so intent are they on the practice of forgiving sins, they fail to see the wounded.

    And the wounded fill the benches and continue to bleed upon the walls of their religion unseen or cared for.

    How is that religion any different than my childhood home?

    Wasn’t the cover of family supposed to protect the children?

    Somehow in the minds of the people in the pews they believe their children are safe from pedophiles, while pedophiles are preaching to them, sitting by them, singing with them, their blind faith has them unseeing.

    Their faith is to please God by blessing the sinners, while the sinners are free to sin against them again and again.

    The blessers fail to see that the it is not working, that the tools they are using are useless to stop children from being raped.

    And even more importantly, they can’t see themselves harboring criminals when they do so.

    A den of criminals is how my old religion feels. One huge moving abiding blind horrifying mess.

    If you can’t get the blessers to stop blessing, how in the world can you get the pedophiles to stop raping?

    What tools does your religion have to stop this insanity?
    How powerful is that religion if it condones this?
    Who are you as you sit in the pew?
    What are you truly part of?
    What are you supporting?

    I am sorry, but if you belong to a group that has had generations of pedophiles roaming freely, you are not in a religion but in a cult of pedophiles, that is disguised as a religious church.

  • A Pedophiles Nest

    There is only one human race, but there are many small sprints or similar roads we travel and our travel companions often times are running silently with us, unbeknownst to either of us.

    We feel alone and separated, when in fact our road is quite packed and overrun with folks of all ages.

    As refugees of our own secret war we hide our battle scars, for it is not a war we are proud to be in, it is more like we are prisoners of this war.

    Wartime prisoners walking free in chains of guilt and confused of who our real enemy is and fearful of those we love.

    To frighten to speak of the war crimes, we soldier on in silence, while our behavior displays great cover-ups and covert actions.

    Are we soldiers or are we prisoners?

    Who are we fighting for, whose side are we on?

    In the war of abuse the lines get fuzzy, our enemy lines are blurred by images of father, uncle, brother, sister, mother.

    The enemy looks and sounds too familiar. We can’t tell ‘friendly’ fire from those of our enemies.

    The war against abuse becomes the war against the family, a family’s civil war.

    This family civil war begins when a parent abuses a child or allows a child’s abuse to go untreated. The family home then becomes a war zone, where you’re living with the enemy, a prisoner of war.

    The war has been waging for generations and many lifetimes…and yet we feel that we are the ones who start the war by speaking of it, when if fact we are trying to end it.

    Ending this war means ending the ‘family’ as it stands.

    The insanity of it all, is what they call family is really a civil war, where children are born prisoners and in order to be free, have to leave the family.

    I am not sure I can articulate this correctly, but we are born into the land of the enemies and we are supporting a war machine while being the land it occupies.

    It is like we are on the team of our enemies fighting against ourselves.

    And to me, the reality of this was the beginning of an out and out war, for as long as I was a silent and well-behaved prisoner of war, a family’s image remained intact and the monster remained behind the façade of father.

    The near impossible task is to see the enemy of the family’s civil war, to feel the love evaporate, the trust turn to fear, and face that you lived in the middle of enemy territory.

    The refugees of this war come stumbling out of their families…lost, confused and alone or in the company of siblings in the same condition. In order to win the war, we’ll have to fight against the family, become its enemy.

    What is seen, as a family civil war is actually the war against abusive behavior, is a fight for the innocent children, a battle to begin healing from criminal acts in childhood.

    For all the new refugees and soldiers who have switched sides, I applaud you and your bravery and courage to stand up against enemies.

    The good news is that you have been fighting to keep a monster in power, and now you are fighting to take him down and all the energy, strength and endurance you have used to live within enemy camp can now be used against him/her.

    The family civil war can only be won in tearing the family apart and display it as it is, a pedophile’s nest.

  • Elders of the Church

    There are no coincidences in life and the fact that I am learning about more and more sexual abuse in my old church while I am reading Alice Miller is profound.

    She is literally writing about the hows and the whys that seemingly intelligent functioning adults are unable to stop this behavior…or it seems “Knows” and does nothing.

    What I am getting a view of is my family but displayed in a much bigger group, widespread from state to state.

    That there is an underlying very pervasive evil preying upon the children, while half the adults sleep and the other are the perpetrators, and all presenting a mask to society of high morals and values, where TV, Music, drinking and drugs, etc are forbidden, where truth and honesty is the way of life….

    The grand scale and its history from generation to generation of criminal sexual behavior under the auspices of a religion of high morals and value is mind blowing.

    My mother was not an anomaly she was a typical church mother.

    And what is so extremely shocking to me is that I didn’t know of it when I was in it. Yet, here is the deal on that…I didn’t leave the church until I had seen the truth of who my father was. So, I guess, their families were like my family we all matched…so we were not outstanding in the fact that the children in the family were abused.

    Knowing that my father abused the neighbors and the neighbor’s parents were in the church and did nothing shows to me, that they too didn’t find this shocking or something that should be presented to the law of the land.

    Again, I felt I lived in this little nest of incest with neighbors that I later found out had their own nests, but that we were the ‘odd’ ones in the church. But 6 years later, I am finding out that we are far from odd, but perhaps just normal parishioners.

    In Alice’s book she speaks of forgiveness in how I seen it work in the church and how it actually is the juice that keeps the evil in the pulpits and on the church boards, literally running the church while raping the children.

    “Can forgiveness for the crimes done to the child be not just ineffective but actively harmful? It certainly can because the body does not understand more precepts. It fights to make our conscious minds admit the truth and transcend our denial of genuine feelings. This is something children cannot afford to do. They have to deceive themselves and turn a blind eye to their parent’s crimes in order to survive. Adults no longer need to repress their feelings. But if they do, the price they pay is high. Either they ruin their own health or make others foot the bill.”

    “A therapist who has forgiven his parents for the cruelty they showed him may feel the urge to suggest this same remedy to his clients. In so doing, he is exploiting their dependence and their trust. If he is not in touch with his own feelings at all, he may indeed be unaware that he is doing to others what was once done to him. In suggesting forgiveness as a solution, the therapist is abusing and confusing others, while rejecting any kind of responsibility for his actions. He is convinced that he is acting for their own good. Are not all religions unanimously in their conviction that forgiveness is the path to Heaven? Was not Job ultimately reward for the fact that he forgave God?”

    “Unlike children, adult patients have a choice. They can leave a therapist once they have seen through his deception and self-deception….”

    “To break through this vicious cycle we need to understand that so-called love cannot survive abuse, deception, and exploitation without seeking new victims. And if it requires new victims it is no longer love but at best the longing for love. Only unflinching realization of one’s own past reality, of what really happened can break through the chain of abuse. If I know and can feel what my parents did to me when I was totally defenseless, I no longer need victims to befog my awareness. I no longer need to reenact what happened to me and take it out on innocent people because now I know what happened. And if I want to live my life consciously, without exploiting others, then I must actively accept that knowledge.” Alice Miller

    What is so vastly incredible is that the one thing a child needs to heal is not offered to him in that church, instead the only thing that is offered is the forgiveness of sins and the fourth commandment…”to love and Honor thy parents”.

    It is no wonder to me, as a person who has lived in the system, who was abused and left untreated there, and has witnessed the responses of my siblings, that this vein of power is still in play, whether you leave the church or not, it will take Herculean power to stop the mind set of forgiving sexual crimes and not passively accept love hurts.

    As long as forgiveness is preached, children will suffer abuse from the elders of the church.

  • A New Legacy to Begin.

    “There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.”
    Soren Kierkegaard

    I did yoga today, only the second time this week, and I felt the stiffening up of my body, the tight joints and the way I seemed to have drifted away from the presence of me.

    I fall quickly into a world that has little of me in it…for without taking the time each day, I slip away unnoticed.

    My body pays the price; my essence gets left in the background and to the forefront arrives all kinds of reasons to leave it there.

    My weakening resolve plays with any lazy excuse and before I know it a week has passed and I have not spent any time with me just for me.

    What came to me in yoga today (which is another reason to do yoga, great insights) is that we are greeted into the world and then ‘told’ or highly suggested how this world operates and are then programmed to fit in. We learn life from the eyes and perceptions and actions of our parents.

    Imagine instead if we were left to explore on our own, to see freely and build ourselves from the inside out?

    Instead our insides desires and passions, questions and interests are put aside due to the ‘knowledge’ our parents have about life.

    Instead of us gulping up and witnessing the fresh look at life when babies arrive, we stifle it and bend it and hurt it so that the child’s view of life matches our own.

    How backwards and how growth stunting this is to take new fresh energy and make it look old and stiff.

    On my mail route I deliver mail to what we would call ultra conservative families, where the woman are dressed as they did on the wagon trails out west, bonnets and long flowing calico dresses.

    As this bonnet-wearing woman answers her door, there are children of each age at her legs, and I am amazed that she has gone along with this dress code and submissively is led to live as they did 100 years ago…yet what I know is that each generation before refused changes, refused to see progress and actually applauds the legacy that has held strong regardless of progress all around them.

    The youngest ones smile freer, the bit older ones look in awe but with a tinge of fear as they hang back, but the littlest ones meet your eyes and smile wildly for they react naturally untaught.

    Along the route are various degrees of ultra conservatives and what I see the most is the absence of children being children, for they are like young adults, doing adult jobs with adult responsibility.

    In Alice Miller’s books, her main trust is the lost child, how adults greet it with all their issues and steal away the innocence, the lack of pure enthusiasm, love, peace and joy, and fill it up with all things opposite.

    As I completed my yoga, I thought what most of us are craving and thirsty for is the freedom and innocence of babies, to be able to be set free from our parents legacy, to give back our ‘inheritance’ and go it alone.

    Imagine a world of grown up newborns…all living life from what they feel and experience instead of what is acceptable by their parents.

    The parents are our biggest detriment to society and yet they can also be the biggest factors in change…for by changing my attitude and by me seeing my children, my children will see theirs.

    The chain has to be broken in order for it to be fixed.

    You can’t fix things at the same level they were created at, says the wise man Einstein, and I agree.

    I told my daughter yesterday, I had to leave my family in order for the abuse to stop; I had to leave my family in order to save my children. I had to do what was best for the child, not the legacy of the family

    That old legacy had to end in order for a new legacy to begin.